About KYOB

What is Know Your Own Bone?

Let’s start by declaring what this is not: Know Your Own Bone is not another “Here’s What I Think!” website. There are plenty of opinion websites available for those seeking subjective geek speak. Know Your Own Bone is a data-informed website about business-related best practices for visitor-serving organizations to aid in achieving both their mission-related and financial goals.

Know Your Own Bone focuses on your audience and how they think and behave. While organizations may have the specific expertise to declare a matter important, it is the market that ultimately determines a matter’s relevance. Visitor-serving organizations benefit by knowing their audiences – and Know Your Own Bone focuses on operations from the outside-in (i.e. audience centric) rather than the traditional inside-out way of approaching operations. As a result, the data and analysis that I share sometimes busts outdated industry myths and serves to challenge the dogmas that tend to govern cultural organizations.

Why write Know Your Own Bone?

I’m the Chief Market Engagement Officer for IMPACTS Research & Development, a private company that provides predictive intelligence to inform development, economic, marketing and policy strategies. I have been granted permission by sponsoring organizations and clients to share the data that appear on this website. Often, their publication on Know Your Own Bone represent the first time that the data have been publicaly shared. I’m a millennial. I grew up singing along with Care Bears in a “sharing is caring” world. So, in my work at IMPACTS, I keep my eyes peeled for interesting data that I think will be of broader interest, and then beg for permission to share it with fellow nonprofit and cultural professionals. I like to think of myself as a private-sector/nonprofit-sector double agent.

I publish Know Your Own Bone because I’m often in meetings with access to insanely awesome, blindside-the-nonprofit-CEO data and analysis – and often the same data would be extremely valuable to others in the industry. Part of my mission is to make helpful data, analysis, best practices, experiences, and information available to the nonprofit and cultural communities. You won’t catch ads or paid endorsements on this website. My goal is knowledge transfer – not commerce. I write Know Your Own Bone because I think that it’s the right thing to do (and because, as I mentioned, I fancy myself a sneaky double agent… though perhaps I may simply be a millennial who just cannot keep her mouth shut).

How did you start Know Your Own Bone?

I started Know Your Own Bone in 2009 as I was moving from Seattle to Los Angeles to get my Master of Public Administration at the University of Southern California. In the beginning, Know Your Own Bone mostly shared information regarding how cultural organizations were using social media at a time when most weren’t yet doing so. My first ever webinar was hosted by IMLS in 2010 and I was “hired off the speaking circuit” by IMPACTS later that year. Know Your Own Bone then began its evolution from a graduate student’s blog to a data-informed resource website. Today – and thanks in large part to Know Your Own Bone – I am honored to work with amazing clients around the world, participate in “pinch me” board meetings with brilliant minds, conduct international keynotes, provide guest lectures and serve as required reading for graduate students, and happily host over 80,000 fellow cultural center nerds on this website each month.

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; Gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.” – Henry David Thoreau

Let’s Talk Data

Where does the information and data come from?

THE NAAU STUDY

The National Attitudes, Awareness, and Usage Study was originally funded by IMPACTS in partnership with The David and Lucille Packard Foundation and Monterey Bay Aquarium. Since then, work concerning other organizations – most notably Stanford University – has contributed to its continuing updates. With a sample population of over 108,000 US adults (and counting), it is believed to be the largest ongoing study of perceptions and behaviors related to visitor-serving organizations in the United States. More on the study

MONITORING OF 224 ORGANIZATIONS

IMPACTS conducts ongoing data collection efforts with regard to 224 visitor-serving organizations in the United States. These organizations range from various museum types to zoos, aquariums, theaters, botanic gardens, parks symphonies, and other performing arts entities. Monitoring these organizations helps us spot trends and allows for deeper dives into visitor behaviors and perceptions when considered alongside the NAAU.

INDIVIDUAL CLIENT WORK

Individual client work with visitor-serving organizations is my primary source of thought-fuel. Ideas for posts and data queries arise from topics that I (or my colleagues) find ourselves discussing with individual entities. That said, you won’t find many references to individual client organizations on this site. Their stories and experiences are their own to share (or not). Sometimes I am able to share individual client data and anonymize the findings.

Why does IMPACTS collect data about visitor-serving organizations?

It’s not what you think.

Yes, we work with select visitor-serving clients – but that’s not the primary reason why we collect so much information. Visitor-serving organizations are R&D for IMPACTS. Think about it: It takes a keen understanding of visitor motivations and behavioral economics in order to entice a potential visitor to attend a cultural organization. In order to visit a museum, a person might need to take their children out of soccer practice, load the kids in the car, travel into the city, park the car (somewhere?), play real-life Frogger crossing a busy street, keep spirits up while exploring educational exhibits, fend of hunger pains, avoid (or embrace) the gift shop, etc. There’s so much good stuff to understand about consumer motivations in these behaviors – and we’re not even discussing philanthropic giving yet! Gathering and understanding this information helps us better serve our for-profit and policymaking clients (not to mention our select visitor-serving clients!) – and that’s why this information is valuable to IMPACTS.

Can I get a copy of the NAAU?

Hold up! If you’re imaging that the NAAU is a traditional questionnaire or a one-after-another question survey, you’re mistaken. (That said, your assumption may be fair – advanced data processes are still too rare within the cultural industry.) The NAAU collects a multiplicity of data types including demographic information, scalar variables, and open-ended queries. As is the case with most real-time, big data processes, the NAAU lives on servers so that it can be consistently updated, queried, organized, and referenced in meaningful ways. Printing the NAAU would result in tens of thousands of pages of uncategorized data – data that is constantly being updated and refreshed. I work with the NAAU team to present the data – and accompanying analysis – in way that is (hopefully) broadly comprehensible and actionable.

What is the relationship between IMPACTS and KYOB?

IMPACTS is a company of approximately 85 professionals working predominantly with entertainment and policymaking entities. The vast majority of our engagements are of the “behind the scenes” nature in so much as we provide the data and supporting technologies that help inform our clients’ strategies and operations. Since its founding in 2005, most of the company’s work has been engaged the old-fashioned way – through word of mouth endorsements, client referrals, and carefully cultivating industry relationships. Enter: This gal…a digital native who has been making a mess of the company’s careful, quiet brand strategy and pushing the merits of cultural work since I got picked up by IMPACTS off of the museum speaking circuit in 2010.

If it is not immediately obvious how the entertainment, policymaking, and cultural sectors align, consider this: Each type of entity has a vested interest in influencing the hearts and minds of their audiences. Generally, they each aim to engage the public to act in their interest and hope to monetize this behavior. Understanding the motivations that underpin why someone votes for a particular political candidate, or why they go to see a certain movie, or why they visit a cultural organization all depends foremost on understanding the opinions and behaviors of the market. Since shining the spotlight on opportunities to lend data-informed best practices to the cultural community, Know Your Own Bone has helped IMPACTS gain additional recognition among its for-profit clients, strengthen relationships among universities and policymaking entities, cultivate impactful partnerships, and better contemplate how we can harness the information that we have to empower on-the-scene change-makers. (That’s you.)

Will you please put the information on this site into a book?

What’s that I’m hearing? That cultural organizations need physical paper in their hands in order to evolve in a digital era? No worries. I’ve got you. A book project featuring much of the data shared here is in the works.

A BIG THANK YOU!

It takes a village, and this is mine: IMPACTS gives me permission to share nonproprietary data with the world and enables this millennial to work in offices and board rooms with some of the most inspiring leaders out there. Folks at IMPACTS cut data, edit articles, provide feedback, and (largely) refrain from saying, “Chill, lady,” when I get too excited about digging into new ideas. The team at Guy Bauer Productions is crazy talented, makes every video shoot a blast, and creates delightful video notes like the one on the left. Orbit Media designed this awesome site and keeps it up and running, and Makeup By Jaycie is a miracle worker. Most of all, thank you to all of you who work tirelessly to inspire and educate the masses in a changing world. I hope that this website gets you thinking, talking, and helps you in your missions to make the world a better place. Thank you for visiting, reading, and sharing.